August 2019 – tim dobbs photography

I have shot most of the available and discontinued slide films over the years and processed them in E6 and cross processed in C41 and it never fails to give you a great feeling holding up some slides to the light.

So obviously when Kodak announced that they were bringing back Ektachrome I couldn’t wait to get some to play with.

Once I bought a few rolls I decided to load the 1st roll into my Nikon F100 as it gives me pretty much spot on exposures when I shoot slide film.

As you can see from the 1st shot on the roll I began shooting on March 30th and I took about 4 months to complete the roll as I wanted to try it on a range of subjects and lighting conditions.

I had the film developed & scanned by AG Photographic as I didn’t want to mess up the developing and get unreliable results.

I have to say the film lived up to my expectations … colours and sharpness were great and even shooting into the sun worked, also portraits came out good too.

So here is the complete roll in the order that I shot them … comments welcomed.

Please click a photo to view larger

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

I have quite a large stock of expired film acquired from friends/fellow photographers and eBay and I usually know the storage details of nearly all of it but sometimes I get hold of some rolls that have no information on how it spent it’s life.

Last week the cloud formations up here in the South Wales valleys was pretty nice so I went out with my Mamiya 645 and 45mm f2.8 lens with a roll of ilford Delta 400 with the intention of getting some pretty detailed images of the landscape up here.

The film expired in 2004 so I rated it at 200 iso and proceeded to shoot the roll.

To be honest I have only had trouble with expired ilford film when it has been much older that this and even then it was still usable so when I opened up the development tank and was greeted with some pretty murky negatives I was pretty disappointed.

Once I began scanning it became evident that the whole roll was under exposed quite a bit and the grain was very pronounced unlike how Delta usually looks.

I also suspected that my fix was on its last legs which didn’t help matters (new batched already mixed for next time).

The Epson scan software struggled to find the edges of some frames which meant I had to scan each frame individually.

Once in Adobe Lightroom I have spent the last week back and fore between Lightroom & Photoshop trying to get the best out of the scans and I managed to salvage 9 frames which I am happy to post.

Anyway …. lesson for today … Know how your film has been stored before taking any important shots.

Also buy more fresh Delta 400 because if I managed to get these images with a crappy old roll imagine what they would look like on fresh film and maybe with my Fuji Gw690ii 6×9.

Here are the images … comments most welcome